After I had plated the meal and we were eating, she said, “Do you remember that bite in the CME we talked about that night we met? Did you ever see that again, or get a sense of what could have caused it?”
I shook my head, swallowed. “Never saw it again. I think it must have been a test.”
“But of what? Someone testing whether they could plug a syrup tap into the pipeline and divert a point their way?”
“Maybe. My quant friends think that happens all the time. Kind of an urban legend for them. Tap in for ten seconds and disappear with a lifetime stash.”
“Do you think that could happen?”
“I don’t know. I’m not a quant.”
“But I thought you were.”
“No. I mean I’d like to be, and I can follow quants when they talk to me, but I’m a trader mostly.”
“That’s not what Evie and Amanda say. They say you pretend not to be a quant so you can do things, but you really are.”
“I would if I could,” I said honestly. Why I was being this honest, I had no idea. Possibly I had an intuition that she might find that more amusing than pretended quantitude. I like to be amusing if I can.
“Say you could do it,” she said. “Would you?”
“What, tap a line? No.”
“Because it would be cheating?”
“Because I don’t need to. And yeah. I mean it is a game, right? So cheating would mean you’re lame at the game.”
“Not that much of a game, though. It’s just gambling.”
“But gambling smart. Figuring out trades that outsmart even the other smart traders. That’s the game. If you didn’t have that, it would just be, what, I don’t know. Data analysis? Desk job in front of a screen?”
“It is a desk job in front of a screen.”
“It’s a game. And besides the screen is interesting, don’t you think? All those different genres and temporalities, all running at once … it’s the best movie ever, live every day.”
“See, you are a quant!”
“But it isn’t math, it’s literature. Or like being a detective.”
She nodded, thinking it over. “Why haven’t you detectived this CME bite, then?”
“I don’t know,” I said. So much honesty! “Maybe I will.”
“I think you should.”
She shifted next to me on the cushion.
I registered this and said, kind of cluelessly, “Dessert? Postprandial?”
“What have you got?” she said.
“Whatever,” I said. “Actually the bar is mostly single malts right now.”
“Oh good,” she said. “Let’s try them all.”
It turned out that she had an alarmingly extensive knowledge of costly single malts, and like all sensible connoisseurs had come to the conclusion that it was not a matter of finding the best, but of creating maximum difference, sip to sip. She liked to dabble, as she put it.
And in more than just drinking alcohol. I came out of the cabin with a clutch of bottles in each hand and sat down somewhat abruptly beside her and she said, “Oh my God, it’s Bruichladdich Octomore 27,” and leaned in and kissed me on the mouth.
“You just had a sip of Laphroaig,” I said as I tried to catch my breath.
She laughed. “That’s right! A new game!”
I doubted it was new but was happy to play.
“Don’t drink too much,” she said at one point.
“Hummingbird sips,” I murmured, quoting my dad. I tried to illustrate by kissing her ear, and she hummed and reached out for me. Her dress was rucked up around her waist by this point, and like most women’s underwear hers was easy to push around. Lots of kissing left me gasping. “You’re going long on me,” she murmured, and straddled me and kissed me more.
“I am,” I said.
“And I’m having a little liquidity crisis,” she said.
“You are.”
“Oh. That’s good. Don’t strand those assets. Here, use your mouth.”
“I will.”
And so on. At one point I looked up and saw her body glowing whitely in the starry night, and she was watching me with that same amused expression as before. Then later still she put her head back on the thwart and looked at the stars, and said, “Oh! Oh!” After that she slid down to join me and we crashed around on the floor of the cockpit trying to make it all work, but mainly I was still hearing that oh oh, the sexiest thing I had ever heard in my life, electrifying beyond even my own orgasm, which was saying a lot.
Eventually we lay there tangled on the cockpit floor, looking at the stars. It was a warm night for autumn, but a little breeze cooled us. The few stars visible overhead were big and blurry. I was thinking, Oh shit—I like this gal. I want this gal. It was scary.
New York is in fact a deep city, not a high one.
—Roland Barthes
Where there’s a will there’s a won’t.
—Ambrose Bierce
b) Mutt and Jeff
What happened?”
“I don’t know. Where are we?”
“I don’t know. Weren’t we …”
“We were talking about something.”
“We’re always talking about something.”
“Yes, but it was something important.”
“Hard to believe.”
“What was it?”
“I don’t know, but meanwhile, where are we?”
“In some kind of room, right?”
“Yeah … come on. We live in our hotello, on the farm floor of the old Met Life tower. The old Edition hotel, used to be a very fine hotel. Remember? That’s right, right?”
“That’s right.” Jeff shakes his head hard, then holds it in his hands. “I feel all foggy.”
“Me too. Do you think we’ve been drugged?”
“Feels like it. Feels like after I had that tooth pulled in Tijuana.”
Mutt regards him. “Or remember after your colonoscopy? You couldn’t remember what happened.”
“No, I don’t remember that.”
“Exactly. Like that.”
“For you too? Now, I mean?”
“Yes. I forget what we were talking about right before this. Also, how we got here. Basically, what the fuck just happened.”
“Me too. What’s the last thing you remember? Let’s find that and see if we can work forward from it.”
“Well …” Mutt ponders. “We were living in our hotello, on the farm floor of the Met Life tower. Very breezy when out among the plants. A little noisy, great view. Right?”
“That’s right, there we were. Been there a couple months, right? Lost our previous room when it melted?”
“Right, Peter Cooper Village, extra high tide. Moon or something. Landfill just can’t hold a building upright over the long haul. So then …”
Jeff nods. “Yeah that’s right. We were trying to stay away from my cousin, which is why we were in such a shithole to begin with. Then over to the Flatiron where Jamie lived, and when they kicked us out, he told us about the Met tower possibility. He likes to bail out friends.”
“And we were coding for your cousin, that was definitely a mistake, and then gigging. Encryption and shortcuts, the yin and the yang. Greedy algorithms are us.”
“Right, but there was something else! I found something, or something was bothering me …”
Mutt nods. “You had a fix.”
“For the algorithm?”
Mutt shakes his head, looks at Jeff. “For everything.”
“Everything?”
“That’s right, everything. The world. The world system. Don’t you remember?”
Jeff’s eyes go round. “Ah, yeah! The sixteen fixes! I’ve been cooking those up for years! How could I forget?”
“Because we’re fucked up, that’s how. We were drugged.”
Jeff nods. “They got us! Someone got us!”
Mutt looks dubious. “Did they read your mind? Put a ray on us? I don’t think so.”
“Of course not. We
must have tried something.”
“We?”
“Okay, I might have tried something. Possibly I gave us away.”
“That sounds familiar. I think it’s something that might have happened before. Our career has been long but checkered, as I recall quite well. All too well.”
“Yeah yeah, but this was something bigger.”
“Apparently so.”
Jeff stands, holds his head with both hands. Looks around. He walks over to a wall, runs his fingers over a tight seal in the shape of a door; there is no knob or keyhole inside this door-shaped line in the wall, although there is a rectangular line inside it, around waist height on Jeff, knee height on Mutt. “Uh-oh. This is a watertight seal, see what I mean?”
“I do. So what does that mean? We’re underwater?”
“Yeah. Maybe.” Jeff puts his ear to the wall. “Listen, you can hear it gurgling.”
“Sure that isn’t your blood in your ear?”
“I don’t know. Come check and see what you think.”
Mutt stands, groans, looks around. The room is long, and would be square if seen in profile. In it are two single beds, a table, and a lamp, although their illumination seems to also come from the low-lit white ceiling, about eight feet over them. There is a little triangular bathroom wedged into the corner, in the style of cheap hotels everywhere. Toilet and sink and shower in there, running water hot and cold. Toilet flushes with a quick vacuum pull. In the ceiling there are two small air vents, both covered by heavy mesh. Mutt comes back out of the bathroom and walks up and down the length of the room, placing his heels right against his toes and counting his steps, lips pulsing in and out as he calculates.
“Twenty feet,” he says. “And about eight feet tall, right? And the same across.” He looks at Jeff. “That’s how big containers are. You know, like on container ships. Twenty feet long, eight wide, eight and a half feet tall.”
He puts his ear to the wall across from Jeff. “Oh yeah. There’s some kind of noise from the other side of the wall.”
“Told you. A watery noise, right? Like toilets flushing, or someone showering?”
“Or a river running.”
“What?”
“Listen to it. Like a river? Right?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what a river sounds like, I mean, when you’re in it or whatever.”
The two men eye each other.
“So we’re …”
“I don’t know.”
“What the fuck does that mean?”
“I don’t know.”
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.
Money, n. A blessing that is of no advantage to us excepting when we part with it.
—Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary
The privatization of governmentality. The latter no longer handled solely by the state but rather by a body of non-state institutions (independent central banks, markets, rating agencies, pension funds, supranational institutions, etc.), of which state administrations, although not unimportant, are but one institution among others.
supposed Maurizio Lazzarato
c) that citizen
Metropolitan Life Insurance Company bought the land at the southeast corner of Madison Square in the 1890s and built their headquarters there. Around the turn of the century the architect Napoleon LeBrun was hired to add a tower to this new building, which he decided to design based on the look of the campanile in the Piazza San Marco in Venice. The tower was completed in 1909 and at that point it was the tallest building on Earth, having overtopped the Flatiron Building on the southwest corner of Madison Square. The Woolworth Building opened in 1913 and took the height crown away, and after that the Met Life tower became famous mostly for its four big clocks, telling the time to the four cardinal directions. The clock faces were so big their minute hands weighed half a ton each.
In the 1920s, Met Life bought the church to the north of the tower, knocked it down, and built their North building. It was intended to be a skyscraper 100 stories tall, well taller than the Empire State Building, which was also being planned at that time, but when the Great Depression struck the Met Life people canceled their plan and capped North at thirty-two stories. You can still see that it’s the base for something much bigger, it looks like a gigantic pedestal missing its statue. And it has thirty elevators inside it, all ready to take people up to those sixty-eight missing floors. Maybe once people get over the freak-out of the floods they’ll tack on the upper spire in graphenated composites, maybe put up three hundred more stories or whatnot. They did miss their bicentennial opportunity, but hey, what’s a century in New York real estate? Some scammer in the year 2230 will be ready with a tricentennial proposal for a superscraper addition. Anyway, now Madison Square is dominated by an enormous replica of Venice’s great campanile. Got to love that coincidence, which gives the bacino now filling the square the look of Italianosity that makes it one of the signature photo ops of the SuperVenice.
Things like that keep happening to Madison Square. It began life as a swamp, created by a freshwater spring that for many years was tapped as an artesian fountain set right in front of the Met, with tin cups chained to the fountain for people to take a drink. The water jumped out of it in spurts said to be suggestive, as in ejaculative, but seems this was only yet another indication of the irrepressible dirty-mindedness of Victorian America. That stone fountain now resides somewhere out on Long Island.
Once the swamp was filled in, using dirt from the shaved-off hills nearby, it became a parade ground for a U.S. Army arsenal, also the intersection of the post road from Boston with Broadway. The parade ground kept getting smaller and smaller, and when the famous grid of east-west streets and north-south avenues was imposed on the landscape, the parade ground was reduced to the rectangle still there, about six acres in size: Twenty-third to Twenty-sixth, between Madison and Fifth, with Broadway angling in and adding another slice to the park.
Early on, the square was occupied on its north side by a big House of Refuge, a place to incarcerate juvenile delinquents. Later Franconi’s Hippodrome provided an interior space for spectacles of various kinds, including dog races and prizefights.
A Swiss family established the popular Delmonico’s on the west side, and the Fifth Avenue Hotel followed on the same site. Stanford White built the first Madison Square Garden on the north side, and crowds came to ride gondolas around in a system of artificial canals; this was before the Met campanile was built, so maybe LeBrun got the Venetian motif from White, who had already built a tower on top of his Gardens complex; for sixteen years the square boasted both these towers. White was shot dead by the jealous husband of a woman he was seeing, right in the Garden during a dinner show. When they tore his place down and built the new Madison Square Garden over at Forty-ninth and Eighth, the steel framing of the old one was saved, and it too remains somewhere on Long Island. Maybe.
Lots of memorial statues of worthy Americans once crowded the square, with one general’s statue also serving as his tomb. Arches were frequently erected over Park Avenue to celebrate American military success in one war or another. The police charged a gathering of leftist demonstrators in the square on May Day of 1919, but this victory over the forces of darkness did not get memorialized with an arch. Nor did the quelling of the riot that happened there when Lincoln’s 1864 draft announcement was most vehemently denounced. Arches were reserved for victories abroad, apparently.
Best of all, in terms of monuments, the hand and torch of the Statue of Liberty spent six years in Madison Square, filling the north end of the park in a truly surrealist fashion, rising two or three times as high as the square’s trees. The photos of that stay are awesome, and if the square were not now a bacino fifteen feet deep in water and floored by aquaculture cages, it would make sense to advocate amputating the hand and torch from the old gal and bringing them back to stand in the square again. It’s not as if she needs the torc
h anymore, the welcome beacon to immigrants having been long since snuffed out. Probably there would be some pushback to that plan, but what a nice park ornament, you could even climb up into it and have a look around. Bright copper in those years.
Teddy Roosevelt was born a block away, had his childhood dance lessons on the square (he kicked the little girls, natch), and ran his 1912 presidential campaign from the Met tower itself; go Progressives! If the progressives now occupying the tower succeed in changing the world, does the Bull Moose get some credit? Most definitely. Though in fact he lost that election.
Edith Wharton was born on the square and later lived there. Herman Melville lived a block to the east and walked through the square every weekday on his way to work on the docks of West Street, including during all of the six years when the Statue of Liberty’s hand and torch stood there in the square. Did he pause before it from time to time to appreciate the weirdness of it, perhaps even considering it to be a sign of his own strangely amputated fate? You know he did. One day he took his four-year-old granddaughter there to play in the park, sat down on a bench, and was looking at that torch so intently that he forgot she was running around in the tulip beds and went back home without her. She found her way back on her own, just as the maid was shoving Melville out the door to go retrieve her. Yes, our man was a space cadet.
The square was the first place in America where a nude statue was exhibited in public, a Diana. She was placed on top of Stanford White’s tower, so she was in fact 250 feet above the prying eyes of her appreciators, but still. They brought telescopes. Possibly the start of a lively New York tradition of boosted viewing of naked neighbors. Now she’s in a museum in Philadelphia. In those same years the Park Avenue Hotel bar featured one of the most eye-poppingly nude paintings of the Belle Epoque, bunch of hot nymphs about to use a worried-looking satyr; that painting now resides in a museum in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Madison Square was sex central in those years!